And Most Of All,
How He Rejoices When The God Of War Flies Howling From The Spear Of
Diomed, And Mounts Into Heaven For Safety!
Then the beautiful
episode of the Sixth Book:
The way to feel this is not to go
casting about, and learning from pastors and masters how best to
admire it. The impatient child is not grubbing for beauties, but
pushing the siege; the women vex him with their delays, and their
talking; the mention of the nurse is personal, and little sympathy
has he for the child that is young enough to be frightened at the
nodding plume of a helmet; but all the while that he thus chafes at
the pausing of the action, the strong vertical light of Homer's
poetry is blazing so full upon the people and things of the Iliad,
that soon to the eyes of the child they grow familiar as his
mother's shawl; yet of this great gain he is unconscious, and on he
goes, vengefully thirsting for the best blood of Troy, and never
remitting his fierceness till almost suddenly it is changed for
sorrow - the new and generous sorrow that he learns to feel when the
noblest of all his foes lies sadly dying at the Scaean gate.
Heroic days are these, but the dark ages of schoolboy life come
closing over them. I suppose it is all right in the end, yet, by
Jove, at first sight it does seem a sad intellectual fall from your
mother's dressing-room to a buzzing school. You feel so keenly the
delights of early knowledge; you form strange mystic friendships
with the mere names of mountains, and seas, and continents, and
mighty rivers; you learn the ways of the planets, and transcend
their narrow limits, and ask for the end of space; you vex the
electric cylinder till it yields you, for your toy to play with,
that subtle fire in which our earth was forged; you know of the
nations that have towered high in the world, and the lives of the
men who have saved whole empires from oblivion. What more will you
ever learn? Yet the dismal change is ordained, and then, thin
meagre Latin (the same for everybody), with small shreds and
patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper's pall over all your
early lore. Instead of sweet knowledge, vile, monkish, doggerel
grammars and graduses, dictionaries and lexicons, and horrible odds
and ends of dead languages, are given you for your portion, and
down you fall, from Roman story to a three-inch scrap of
"Scriptores Romani," - from Greek poetry down, down to the cold
rations of "Poetae Graeci," cut up by commentators, and served out
by schoolmasters!
It was not the recollection of school nor college learning, but the
rapturous and earnest reading of my childhood, which made me bend
forward so longingly to the plains of Troy.
Away from our people and our horses, Methley and I went loitering
along by the willow banks of a stream that crept in quietness
through the low, even plain. There was no stir of weather
overhead, no sound of rural labour, no sign of life in the land;
but all the earth was dead and still, as though it had lain for
thrice a thousand years under the leaden gloom of one unbroken
Sabbath.
Softly and sadly the poor, dumb, patient stream went winding and
winding along through its shifting pathway; in some places its
waters were parted, and then again, lower down, they would meet
once more. I could see that the stream from year to year was
finding itself new channels, and flowed no longer in its ancient
track, but I knew that the springs which fed it were high on Ida -
the springs of Simois and Scamander!
It was coldly and thanklessly, and with vacant, unsatisfied eyes
that I watched the slow coming and the gliding away of the waters.
I tell myself now, as a profane fact, that I did stand by that
river (Methley gathered some seeds from the bushes that grew
there), but since that I am away from his banks, "divine Scamander"
has recovered the proper mystery belonging to him as an unseen
deity; a kind of indistinctness, like that which belongs to far
antiquity, has spread itself over my memory, of the winding stream
that I saw with these very eyes. One's mind regains in absence
that dominion over earthly things which has been shaken by their
rude contact. You force yourself hardily into the material
presence of a mountain, or a river, whose name belongs to poetry
and ancient religion, rather than to the external world; your
feelings wound up and kept ready for some sort of half-expected
rapture are chilled, and borne down for the time under all this
load of real earth and water; but let these once pass out of sight,
and then again the old fanciful notions are restored, and the mere
realities which you have just been looking at are thrown back so
far into distance, that the very event of your intrusion upon such
scenes begins to look dim and uncertain, as though it belonged to
mythology.
It is not over the plain before Troy that the river now flows; its
waters have edged away far towards the north, since the day that
"divine Scamander" (whom the gods call Xanthus) went down to do
battle for Ilion, "with Mars, and Phoebus, and Latona, and Diana
glorying in her arrows, and Venus the lover of smiles."
And now, when I was vexed at the migration of Scamander, and the
total loss or absorption of poor dear Simois, how happily Methley
reminded me that Homer himself had warned us of some such changes!
The Greeks in beginning their wall had neglected the hecatombs due
to the gods, and so after the fall of Troy Apollo turned the paths
of the rivers that flow from Ida and sent them flooding over the
wall, till all the beach was smooth and free from the unhallowed
works of the Greeks.
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